Dennis Haarsager's rolling environmental scan for electronic media. "Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us." --Jerry Garcia "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." --Bob Seger

Twitter @haarsager

Sunday, 02 March 2008

R.I.P., HD DVD

Back in the early 80s, I bought a Betamax VCR and replaced that with another Betamax VCR before that format bit the dust and VHS won. I can really pick 'em. Just over a year ago, I bought a Toshiba HD DVD when Costco dropped the price to $300. It's now a pretty good upscaling DVD player, but you can buy them for under $100.

Cliff Edwards writes:

... while Toshiba lies vanquished, the Blu-ray camp now faces a slew of
technical, business, and marketing challenges in driving consumer adoption of
their victorious standard. To an extent, those issues have been just as much to
blame as the format war for slowing the adoption of the high-definition
successor to the standard DVD format. "Now that the format war is over, it's
just dawning on everybody that our work is just beginning," says Andy Parsons,
chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association, and a senior vice-president at
Pioneer. ...